Category Archives: Netherlands

1573: Lancelot van Brederode, sea beggar

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Dutch revolt general Lancelot van Brederode was beheaded on this date in 1573, bequeathing posterity the gorgeous ruin of his sacked castle.

Lancelot van Bredrode, detail from an illustration of him alongside fellow ‘sea beggar’ Jan van Duivenvoorde, by Johannes Hilverdink.

Lancelot van Brederode (English Wikipedia entry | Dutch) was the bastard half-brother of Hendrick, Lord of Broderode, and both men numbered among the ranks of Calvinist Low Countries nobles determined to break away from Spanish Catholic domination.

This faction became known as the Geuzen, meaning “Beggars”; so prominent was Hendrick that he was the Grote Greus, or “Big Beggar”. Alas, he was chased into exile by the Spanish crackdown and became the Died Young Beggar.

Lancelot’s talents were on the waves, and it’s no surprise that seafaring Watergeuzen were the most prominently successful Beggars of all in the unfolding Dutch Revolt. Unfortunately he was not successful at supporting the defense of Haarlem against Spanish siege: when the Spanish took the city, Lancelot lost his head. To add insult to injury, they destroyed Brederode Castle; the gorgeous ruins were protected as a national monument and partly restored in the 19th century.


The Ruins of Brederode Caste, by Meindert Hobbema. For a more present-day view of the shattered citadel, see here.

Lancelot’s young (at the time of dad’s beheading) son Reinoud van Brederode went on to become a powerful lawyer and diplomat in the Dutch Republic. But not so powerful that he could save his father-in-law, Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, from his own date with Executed Today.

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1523: Jan van Essen and Hendrik Vos, the first Lutheran martyrs

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Christian reformer Martin Luther composed his hymn “Ein neues Lied wir heben an” (literally “A new song we raise” but commonly titled in English “Flung to the Heedless Winds”) in response to a major milestone for his movement: the first evangelicals executed for the faith, namely defrocked Augustinian monks Jan van Essen and Hendrik Vos (or Voes), who were burned on July 1, 1523 in Brussels. “How welcome must that fire have been which hurried them from this sinful life to eternal life yonder,” Luther wrote in a missive to the Low Countries. But it wasn’t that welcome: their entire Antwerp monastery had been suppressed as a heretical nest with all its denizens save these two fleeing the stake, many by way of recantation. Nevertheless, Jan and Hendrik would not be the last of the former Antwerp Augustinians to achieve the martyr’s crown and Luther’s tribute.

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1748: Marretje Arents, for the Pachtersoproer

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On this date in 1748, three instigators of a riot hanged in an Amsterdam public square, while worse fates befell those who came to see it.

It was only a few days earlier that the Pachtersoproer (English Wikipedia entry | Dutch) had torn apart the homes of nineteen tax collectors and magnates in the capital. These violent protests against inequitable taxation and oligarchical power had actually begun in Friesland and Groningen, the northernmost provinces of the Low Countries, before spreading to Amsterdam.

Marretje Arents (English Wikipedia entry | Dutch), a fishmonger supporting four children while her husband was abroad as a soldier in the East Indies, was seen on that Monday, June 24th, clad in a distinctive red chintz exhorting rioters to wreak revenge on the grandees and helping to ransack at least one house. According to the chronicle (1740-1752) of Abraham Chaim Braatbard, she spat at one agent,

Today we are the boss and tomorrow we will come to you at the town hall. Then we will see what we will do with all of you, gentlemen land-thieves … [then, lifting her skirt] Now you can clean my ass, because that’s all I have left for you.

This bold and public flaunting of an insurrectionary intent was not accompanied by a political achievement more lasting than a couple of days’ looting. When Arents simply turned up on June 27th at her market stall to go about her usual business just as if she hadn’t been trying to overturn it all three days before, she was arrested for sedition. Of course, there must have been hundreds of others who either weren’t identified or weren’t deemed worth making an example of who did go right back to their normal lives, nursing their grievances in customary silence.

Marretje Arents’s voice is heard in the annals, at the cost of her life.

By the next day at noon, she and two other perceived leaders of the disturbance, Mat van der Nieuwendijk [see comments] and Pieter van Dordt, were publicly hanged at the Waag op de Dam.* Over the brattle of drummers charged with drowning her incitements to the crowd, she was still heard to keep out her cries for rebellion until the moment the rope closed her throat.

Revenge, my dear citizens, assist me. For you now let me die so shamefully, while I have not fought for myself. I did it for the whole country, against the tyranny of the tenants, who tormented us citizens and forcibly took our money and good for the lease.

She would not have had to outlive her hanging more than a few minutes to see it. As the next of the riotous “captains” was strung up, a disturbance broke out in the packed square. It’s not certainly recorded whether this was a wave of sympathy responding to Marretje Arents, or the chance surge of a large crowd jostling for position, or something else besides — but suddenly the host of onlookers stampeded, crushing their fellows underfoot and pushing others into the Amstel River. Braatbard guessed that some 200 souls might have lost their lives for the sake of this triple execution … but whether 3 lives or 203, the important thing to the Low Countries’ rulers was that the Pachtersoproer did not re-emerge.

* The Waag, or weigh-house, served the bustling commercial district that grew up around Dam Square at the heart of Amsterdam. It was demolished in 1808 under French occupation.


Painting of Dam Square from the late 1600s, by Dutch master Gerrit Berckheyde. The weigh-house in the middle of the square presents an obviously suitable landmark for an affair like a public execution; just as well, since by this time its original function had been ceded to a new and larger weigh-house which still survives as the city’s venerable Waag. It was in the latter building that the dissection was performed that Rembrandt immortalized in The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp.

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1485: William de La Marck, the Wild Boar of the Ardennes

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On this date in 1485, the German warrior William de La Marck was beheaded at Maastricht.

“There is, moreover, in the land, a nobleman of good descent, and fame in warlike affairs, but otherwise, so to speak, Lapis offensionis et petra scandali — and a stumbling block of offence to the countries of Burgundy and Flanders. His name is William de la Marck.”

“Called William with the Beard,” said the young Scot, “or the Wild Boar of Ardennes?”

“And rightly so called, my son,” said the Prior, “because he is as the wild boar of the forest, which treadeth down with his hoofs and rendeth with his tusks. And he hath formed to himself a band of more than a thousand men, all, like himself, contemners of civil and ecclesiastical authority, and holds himself independent of the Duke of Burgundy, and maintains himself and his followers by rapine and wrong, wrought without distinction upon churchmen and laymen.”

–Sir Walter Scott, Quentin Durward. The boar is a major antagonist in this novel, but Scott has him killed, ahistorically, in melee.

Le Sanglier des Ardennes — The Wild Boar of the Ardennes, so christened for his resemblance to that ferocious beast; “he affected to delight in this surname, and endeavoured to deserve it by the unvarying cruelty and ferocity of his life” — tusked his way onto history’s stage in the power vacuum following the collapse of Burgundy as an independent power.

Among other effects, Burgundy’s fall greatly widened the local autonomy of the city of Liege, in present-day Belgium — a city that Burgundy in its recent heyday had violently brought to heel.

And not merely the city, but the entire Prince-Bishopric of Liege.

A tasty truffle for the snuffling, to porcine eyes.

In 1482, the Wild Boar assassinated the sitting Prince-Bishop of Liege, Louis de Bourbon. It’s a scene captured in dark melodrama by Executed Today‘s court painter Eugene Delacroix.

He intended by this stroke to set up his son Jean de La Marck as the Prince-Bishop. Instead he kicked off a civil war and in lieu of the mitre he obtained a payoff from the Prince-Bishopric as Liege turned to resisting the inroads of the Austrian Empire. The Boar now allying with Liege in this endeavor, he was ingloriously ambushed by imperial forces and brought in for butchering.

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1945: Theo van Gogh, famous name

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Theo van Gogh, a Dutch resistance fighter of portentous lineage, was executed by the German occupation on this date in 1945.

This man was the grandson of the famous Theo van Gogh, art dealer and brother to troubled, brilliant painter Vincent van Gogh.

Our Theo was a 23-year-old university student in Amsterdam pulled into anti-Nazi resistance by the imposition of a hated loyalty oath on university personnel and was arrested several times, repeatedly tolling his father for bribes to extract him.

The arrest he couldn’t buy his way out of was a home raid on March 1, 1945 — the very last weeks of the war, while these Germans were in the process of being stranded in the Low Countries. Evidently the collapse of the Reich didn’t dampen their enthusiasm for the cause, because on March 8 the Germans imposed a collective punishment of 100+ executions in revenge for the Dutch resistance’s attempt to assassinate a prominent SS officer.* Theo van Gogh was one of them.

Besides his name-brand ancestry, Theo the World War II resistance figure is also the uncle (quite posthumously — this man wasn’t born until 1957) of film director Theo van Gogh, who’s a far-right martyr in his own right thanks to the vociferous anti-Islamic work that resulted in his 2004 assassination.


Prisoners’ Round (after Gustave Doré) (1890), by Vincent van Gogh.

* That officer, Hanns Albin Rauter, was executed for war crimes in 1949.

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1669: Susanna One-Ear

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On this date in 1669, a slave of the Dutch East India Company named Susanna was sewn into a rock-weighted sack and tossed into Table Bay as punishment for infanticide in the Cape Colony (present-day South Africa).

The spare narration of the company’s journal describes Susanna’s speedy progress from the (not further explained) strangulation of her “half-caste” infant girl — reported on December 11, tried on December 12, and executed on December 13.

December 11th. — In the evening meeting the Fiscal [Cornelis de Cretzer] reported that a female slave of the Company, named Susanna of Bengal, lying stiff and stinking of the small-pox in the slave house, had not hesitated to strangle her infant, a half-caste girl; he likewise submitted the sworn declaration of the surgeon, which mentioned that the poor innocent child had died in consequence. The Council having considered this serious affair at once, ordered that the murderous pig should be placed in confinement in order to be punished according to her deserts.

December 12th. — This evening the Council decreed that the female slave, above mentioned, should be tied up in a bag and thrown into the sea. The minister [Adrianus de Voogd] and sick comforter [Joannes à Bolte(n)] were accordingly sent to her, to admonish her to repentence [sic] of what she had done, so that she might in a Christian manner prepare herself for death to-morrow afternoon.

December 13th. — About 11 o’clock the sentence was read here on the square in presence of the murderess and the public, and afterwards carried out on the roadstead in the presence of all the slaves. For the maintenance of justice it was executed with death [by drowning?].

Unsurprisingly we know little else about Susanna … but we do know something.

A documentation project on the first decades of the Cape Colony features a series called “Uprooted Lives”, by Mansell Upham focusing on the lives of slaves and aboriginals affected by the settlement has a fantastic article (pdf) on “Susanna van Bengale” or “Susanna Een Oor” (Susanna One-Ear). It’s a highly recommended read, not only illuminating the judicial perspectives on infanticide that would have informed her judges, but tracing other, fleeting glimpses of Susanna supplied by the documentary record and illuminating the context of her case in view of two other important trials of mothers that preceded it.

It’s worth the click to read it here.

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1716: Maria of Curacao, slave rebel

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On this date in 1716, a woman named Maria was burned for leading a slave rebellion on the West Indies island of Curacao.

Maria was a cook owned by the Dutch West India Company itself who apparently instigated the slaves on her plantation to rise up and slaughter the white staff in September of 1716.

Whether Maria herself was Curacao-born or a recently captured import is not known, but her plantation of St. Maria held many of the latter category; Curacao was a major shipping nexus for the Dutch slave trade. It’s possible that this meant Maria’s newly-arriving peers were more liable to harbor that cocktail of hope and desperation needed to wager their lives on rebellion.

Whatever the case, the rising was quickly put down. Another slave named Tromp, Maria’s lover, told his torturers that she had sought revenge on a white overseer named Muller for killing her husband.

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1578: Jacob Hessels, “to the gallows, to the gallows!”

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Flanders magistrate Jacob Hessels (Dutch link, as are most that follow) was hanged on this date in 1578.

He was a feared hanging judge — the story about him is that he would drift to sleep at the bench and awake with a start exclaiming, “to the gallows, to the gallows!” — who by profession and disposition was ideally suited for the so-called “Council of Blood” that would be seated in 1567 to help the Spanish Duke of Alba suppress the emerging revolt of the Low Countries against Habsburg sovereignty.


In this 1616 engraving by Simon Frisius, the cadaverous Duke of Alba presides over his Council of Troubles or Council of Blood.

He’s credited in particular with drafting the infamous sentence against Counts Egmont and Hoorn, but these were only highlights among a prolific career that earned him the hatred of the parties that chafed under imperial domination.

This was bad news for Hessels when one of those parties, Calvinists, mounted a coup d’etat that took control of Ghent in late 1577. We have in these pages previously encountered this period, in the form of the Calvinists’ persecution of Catholic monks; they also in the course of things imprisoned a number of secular officials associated with Habsburg/Catholic rule. Most of these would in time be ransomed unharmed; however, one of the principal leaders of the short-lived Calvinist Republic was Francois van Ryhove, who considered Hessels and another captive state’s attorney named Visch to be personal enemies and resolved upon their destruction.

Without color of any law or juridical proceeding, according to this Dutch-language history,

On October 4, 1578, he took the two prisoners out of their dungeon and had them carried outside of the gate in an armed carriage. Not far from town, the carriage stopped at Ryhove’s order, the prisoners were made to climb down, and Ryhove announced that they would be hung on a nearby tree immediately. He then mocked the old Hessels in a shameful way, and he went so far as to mistreat him viciously by grabbing his beard and pulling out a fistful of gray hair, which he put on his hat like a feather as an insignia of his revenge! His companions followed the mocking example of their unworthy leader; then the two unfortunates were hung to the tree.

Hessels and Visch, but especially the former, undoubtedly deserved death, and if that punishment had been imposed on them as a result of a legal judgment, few would have complained. But now they fell as the victims of a shameful, personal vengeance. Ryhove, the head of the Ghent party of revolution, the friend of Orange, had killed them without trial and his crime remained unpunished, for the prince had not power enough to make him feel his displeasure. Was it a miracle that the malcontents were crying out for revenge, that they were using the horrific crime committed by that one man as a pretext to also justify on their part to such atrocities against the Protestants, and that the angry Gentenaars in their turn again took revenge by assaulting the Catholic priests and looting the monasteries?

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1525: Jan de Bakker

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Heretical prelate Jan de Bakker went to The Stake at The Hague on this date in 1525.


Stained glass dedicated to Jan de Bakker at Sint-Jacobskerk in The Hague. (cc) image from Roel Wijnants.

A young ordained priest, Bakker (English Wikipedia entry | Dutch), Bakker got interested in early Sacramentarianism and learned at the foot of that Reformation-proximate scholar Erasmus.

His preaching veering outside the bounds of orthodoxy he was imprisoned briefly and soon set aside his holy orders for the baking trade, itinerant evangelizing, and marriage.

After the Inquisition had a go at menacing him into compliance, Bakker had the honor of submitting his living flesh to the flame under the eyes of the Hapsburg governor, Margaret of Austria. “O death, where is thy victory?” were his last words, quoting Corinthians. “O death, where is they sting?” Not so sanguine as he about the pains of the stake, his illicit wife preferred strategic repudiation to scriptural owns.

As he’s remembered as the Protestant protomartyr in the northern Netherlands he’s had a purchase on subsequent generations’ remembrance, and there are some streets and schools named for him.

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1775: Huttenkloas

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The notorious Dutch criminal Huttenkloas was broken on the wheel on this date in 1775.


The distinctive brand Huttenkloas today attaches to a brewery with a sigil depicting the “chair of Huttenkloas” into which the robber was chained and tortured for several months. This torture device — the chair, not the beer — can be seen at the Palthehuis Museum in Oldenzaal.

Klaas Annink by name (English Wikipedia entry | Dutch), this 65-year-old was implicated in a number of robbers and murders in the vicinity of Hof van Twente, nearby the village where he lived in his creepy shack. His son Jannes and his wife Aarne Spanjers were also condemned for these same crimes, and both also put to death.

We’re a bit short on archival footage of Huttenkloas, but this 2019 re-enactment might do instead.

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